IMO, What to watch - BrightonSEO 2023 Online
A pre-screening of all the decks online (or, at least, what I was able to find), to decide what to watch on 4th-5th of May during the online session. Opinions and onions are mine only.
BrightonSEO is, easy to say, the biggest SEO convention in Europe.
Or, if not the biggest, surely one with the biggest resonance among the community.
Anyway, it’s huge. It’s huge AF.
So, since I wasn’t at the live event two weeks ago, I thought it would be a great time-saving for me to skim some of the slides before joining the online version in two days.
Here’s a file that group all the decks available online. Thanks to Lino Uruñuela for his work!
So here’s a collection of slides and speeches I wouldn’t miss at BrightonSEO online.
Let’s go.
Summary:
Turning A Neglected YouTube Channel into a Traffic Generation Machine
The redemption of content automation: how to scale unique content to 4M+ pages
Entity SEO: How to use the SameAs tag to completely revolutionize the game
Opportunity is Knocking: How to identify growth and expansion opportunities with local SEO data
EXTRA: Named Functions - A Google Sheets guide to Upgrading your Formulas
Crawl Budget: Everything you need to know
Sally Rayner
Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/SallyR7/crawl-budget-everything-you-need-to-know
Ale’s Take: Great read to learn something new on crawling and indexing, and a great refresh as well. Inside are some highly instructive images and a few examples of custom metrics to adopt when you’re evaluating and auditing a website. Some examples are below here:
Google Crawling and Indexing Scheme, expressed in GSC terminology.
Crawl Demand vs Crawl Capacity
Some custom metrics
Having managed a marketplace directly (curious enough, it was a car sale marketplace), I know how much this technical approach can move the needle, so great presentation and applause to you, Sally!
Turning A Neglected YouTube Channel into a Traffic Generation Machine
Phil Nottingham
Ale’s Take: Maybe it’s just me, but I feel we are still squeezing very little value out of YouTube. And what’s even worse is that YouTube has been a reality for years.
Maybe it’s just that it’s video content and not textual content, and we SEOs are not that comfortable with it.
Maybe we tried but were stopped by the x10 costs of a good video compared to a good article.
Don’t know.
Anyway, what Giorgio Taverniti says totally resonates with me: we should create resources, not content. And resources are made by videos, images, infographics, podcasts, texts, tools, 3D images, and so on.
So I think (me first in the line) we should learn more about how YouTube works, and how we can fit it into our product search funnel.
Here are some interesting things:
One Audience per Channel. This sounds totally new to me, gotta be honest. I’ve always thought playlists would do the trick, but this seems reasonable if audiences are very different, as Phil pointed out at the beginning of the pitch.
Why not create your own Netflix? (this is me reading this → 🤯)
Structured data to generate Key Moments snippet
How to get your SEO work prioritized in-house
Maddie McCartney
Ale’s Take: Aglie, Scrum, and all these things may be scary, but as Maddie correctly states at the beginning, those are a “way of working”. I’d even say are a way of thinking. It’s a way to evaluate more releases and partial results over static processes and procedures.
Anyway, I’d like to say that documented processes are a huge part coming to SEO efficiency.
No point in figuring out, or trying to remember, how you did a thing once, and lose hours the second time. It’s not worth your time, and it’s unproductive as well since with documented processes you can start refinement of your processes from 1, not 0.
I strongly suggest you put your head on for three or four hours studying and understanding what Agile can do for you. Not only using these slides but of course going out on the web, looking at how things work when you mix Agile and SEO.
BTW, Adam Gent has a marvelous newsletter about this, so strongly recommend giving it a read.
Here’s the link:
The redemption of content automation: how to scale unique content to 4M+ pages
Greta Munari
Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/GretaMunari1/gretamunari-the-redemption-of-content-automation-257451144
This is SO interesting!
Greta shared with us what they did in Trainline to increase organic traffic to different clusters of pages, using semi-automated content.
Having done this in the past, I understand perfectly how complex is this, but it’s so much more rewarding and satisfying when you see results and impact on search results.
Remember to target long-tail queries with different paragraphs!
I’d say we can easily resume it in three steps. I’m going to share with you what my process was. Anyway, I’m using Greta’s images since things are really similar:
Build your database. This can be a Google Sheet as well. It really depends on what you want to use as variables. So ask yourself:
What’s the departing station?
What’s the arrival station?
How much does the ride last on average?
What’s the first train in the morning?
What’s the last train in the night?
What’s the fastest train?
What companies operate the route?
And so on. I remember when I did it for a car sale marketplace I was working on, the dataset had 30+ fields I can opt to work with to create unique texts.
Build your content templates. The more variations, the better. That time I used AX Semantics; a very good solution that let me set columns in my DB as variables, and automatically set different narratives (I’ve previously written) based on those variables. That’s so much powerful!
The example of the result at the end is really appreciated:
How to generate 8 million SEO test ideas
Will Critchlow
Here’s, again, a great resource on SEO testing by Will Critchlow.
This time no highlights, but a strong recommendation to read and extract as much as you can from the deck.
SEO testing is a powerful concept. Hard to apply at the beginning, but capable of bringing you out of a muddy situation when your traffic is stagnating.
Entity SEO: How to use the SameAs tag to completely revolutionize the game
Genie Jones
Slides: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/genie-jones_brighton-slides-activity-7056200965925797888-Cn0S/
If you already know me, you know how much I’m interested in schema and structured data.
Entity SEO is at the core of the Entity Footprint concept we created in Facile.it (sorry the post is in Italian), so there’s no chance I can miss this talk!
Pretty interesting that Genie shared with us a result of the work conducted on a pretty competitive page about poker hands.
How to Deliver Actionable Insights on Core Web Vitals
Hannah Rogers
Another tech SEO speech. By now I bet you get those are my favorite! =D
The most interesting part is from slide 27, where the presentation goes into Override. It’s a pretty obscure part of the Chrome Dev Tools, but super useful to know for us SEOs to test first-hand fixes we purpose devs talking about CWV.
I strongly suggest you read this article from DebugBear for further explanations.
Opportunity is Knocking: How to identify growth and expansion opportunities with local SEO data
Amanda Jordan
Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/AmandaJordan27/brightonseo-amanda-jordanpptx
Local SEO has different rules from traditional SEO. I mean, not the whole thing, but there are some variations.
That’s why it’s pretty interesting when someone, like Amanda Jordan here, decides to share with us workflows, metrics, and templates like:
A photograph of what data we need to collect or consider…
… and how to organize them.
And a great pair of custom metrics to keep in mind for SEO forecasting:
The XPath to discovery
Jonathan Moore
Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/nathanless/brigthon-seo-the-xpath-to-discovery
Always good to have a refresher on Xpath. You can use them in a bunch of different situations, including analyzing the DOM or scraping data in Screaming Frog, so definitely good to be aware of or be proficient.
Named Functions - A Google Sheets guide to Upgrading your Formulas
Matt Greenwood
That’s an extra, since is from MeasureFest, that I wanted to add after seeing the speech online on the 3rd of May.
TBH, I wasn’t aware of what named functions and lambda functions are in Google Sheets till yesterday night (writing this on 04/05/2023), and this speech showed me a new world I’m so much curious to get in!
During the presentation, I thought about a case or two where I can already apply named functions and lambda, and I think you can have the same feelings going through the slides.
Conclusion
So, if you enjoyed this collection, and hope for more things like that, why not subscribe to my newsletter as well?
I post mainly in English here, but sometimes you’d see some posts in Italian as well. It depends on how’s the mood.
Ma è tutto da studiare! Ci vorrà un pò di tempo per leggerla tutta, ma arrivo. Ciao Andrea!